OUR BEST FRIENDS

Tag: monkey

“Dog House” isn’t a book about a dog; it’s a book about a lifetime of them — about the love we seek, the missteps we take and, at last, making that perfect, or almost perfect, canine connection.

Carol Prisant, though she grew up in a less than pet-friendly home, was pretty sure she was a dog lover, but it took awhile for her to get it right.

With humans, on the other hand, she appears to have succeeded the first time, and her 42-year marriage to husband Millard is the other ongoing theme of her often hilarious, often poignant, but never syrupy memoir.

While the book is about love and loss and dogs — all subjects prone to sappy treatment — Prisant’s sense of humor, honesty and willingness to admit she may not have always been the perfect pet owner make for some fun and refreshing reading.

Prisant, when it comes to the pets in her life, starts at the beginning — with the goldfish that her pet-challenged mother flushed down the toilet, a stinky dime store turtle she subsequently released into the wild, a bird whose toes fell off after she brought it home from Woolworth’s and a monkey that fell in love with her husband’s leg.

Eventually she and her husband work their way up to dogs, including Cosi, a Jack Russell terrier, Fluffy, a purebred collie, and Blue and Billy and Emma and Jimmy Cagney and Juno — to name a few.

All of them had their idiosyncrasies. Some, she admits, were more than they could handle. Some moved on to new homes, and new ones would arrive — up to and after the death of her husband.

“Dog House” is more than a book about dogs, though. It’s about the love of a mother for her son, and, most of all, a wife for her husband.

Prisant is the American editor of the Condé Nast publication The World of Interiors, and author of “Good, Better, Best,” ”Antiques Roadshow Primer,” and “Antiques Roadshow Collectibles.”

An orphan monkey at a Chinese Zoo was being bullied by bigger primates, so zookeepers gave the little fellow his own personal guard dog.

Keepers at Jiaozuo City Zoo said the monkey was always being picked on, and that they had intervened to save his life several times.

“So we put a dog in the monkey cage, hoping he can protect the orphan,” a zoo spokesman told the China News Network.

The zoo said the dog, Sai Hu, does his job well.

“Whenever the baby monkey gets bullied, he dashes up and drives the others away. And the baby monkey is also very smart. Each time he smells danger he runs to jump on the dog’s back and holds on tight.

“The alpha male monkey has been really unhappy since we sent in Sai Hu. He tried to organize several ambushes on the little monkey, but they all failed because of the dog,” added the spokesman.